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Shadows Out Of Time and Space: The European AvantGarde and the Future of the Blues
Shuja Haider

Part 1 1. In his 1975 text Blues and the Poetic Spirit, Paul Garon attempts an analysis of AfricanAmerican blues music using a Surrealist methodology, one that properly incorporates the psychoanalytic theory integral to that movement, and does not assume bourgeois definitions of notions like politics or, indeed, "poetry." For Garon, it is essential to reconceive poetry in a manner informed by the practice of Surrealism, and developed most of all in the writing of Andre Breton. Garon says in his introduction, Hopefully the concept of poetry which, as an activity of mind, has been totally ignored by the same criticsso preoccupied have they been with outmoded theories of meter, rhyme, and the retrograde doltish sniveling of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their ilkhopefully everything having to do with poetry, in the most vital and active sense as the revolt of the spirit, will be clarified in the discussions that follow. (Garon 6) Garon finds surrealism in the blues, conceiving of surrealism as a discursive method rather than an historical period. His materialist approach is indebted to an idea Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky expressed in their Manifesto Toward a Revolutionary Art, which insisted that we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity takes place; nor should we fail to pay all respect to those

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particular laws which govern intellectual creation (What Is Surrealism? 243). As Breton himself acknowledged elsewhere, the things most surrealists had in common were a petty-bourgeois background and an inclination toward plastic arts and literature (WIS 153). Garons aim is to start out under different intellectual conditions and locate what we might call a surrealist impulse, to invert a phrase coined by Amiri Baraka in his 1966 essay R&B and the Changing Samethe blues impulse (Baraka 180). This is not a tidy equivalence, but in considering either respective practice as impulse rather than category, the walls of dominant ideological categories like nation, class, genre, and so on weaken and crumble. Ironically, it is this imperative that Garon loses sight of, and it becomes the glaring aporia in his study. While Garon is undeniably fluent with the plurality of Surrealist thought, with its incorporation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and other component parts, his conception of the blues falls victim to the same reification and superficiality he decries in the introduction. Framing the statement-of-purpose he begins with is a desperate lament for dearly departed blues. Occasional glimmers of hope that the trend of blues revivalism will bring the insight and revolutionary character of the form back to American culture confirm the point: the blues once was, and is no more (Garon vii). Any rigor in the remainder of the text is compromised with expressions of Garons distaste for any African-American music besides blues and jazz, at one point condemning Junior Wells and Buddy Guy for sounding too much like James Brown, even sniping at the supposed poetic deficit in the Godfathers words (Garon 29). The short-sighted pessimism of Garons treatment of black music is unfortunate in light of the complexity and precision of his analysis of the blues. However, Garon refuses to complement his notion of a surrealist impulse with the blues impulse identified by Baraka,

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resulting in infidelity to his own dialectical, historical commitment. To break open the boundaries erected by Garon requires a willingness to look in the wrong places, taking to heart Franklin Rosemonts identification of an accursed tradition in popular culture, illuminated by surrealism, that is emblazoned by the colors of the future (Garon 224-5). Music, mostly ignored by the Surrealist movement, provides a necessary point of departure for futures of the European avant-garde's spirit of revolt. Paul Garons work can help point the way, albeit in between the lines. 2. Looking in the wrong placesthe basis of a form like collageis no doubt a crucial avantgardist habit. It also is what was happening when Andre Breton, who boasted he never went to concerts, nonetheless made it a point to attend jazz performances during his exile in New York, and when European avant-gardists collected and danced to jazz records (WIS 348).# It was also a willingness to look in unexpected directions that led Andre Breton to write, in 1946, a careful examination of music, taking positions contrary to the disdain for music that had been second nature for many surrealists. In that essay, Silence is Golden, Breton acknowledges a general antagonism that presents itself for writers between music and language (WIS 349). Admitting that his ability to speak on the subject is marred by his lack of musical knowledge, he nonetheless suggests that, like all the antimonies presented by modern thought, this antagonism should not be fruitlessly deplored but, on the contrary, should be interpreted as an indication of the necessity for a recasting of certain principles of the two arts (350). He compares this possibility to one he had already seen in the plastic arts: The painter will fail in his human mission if he continues to widen the gulf separating representation and perception instead of working

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towards their reconciliation, their synthesis. In the same way, on the auditive plane, I believe that music and poetry have everything to lose by not recognizing a common origin and a common end in song, by letting the mouth of Orpheus get farther every day from the lyre of Thrace. (351) Ironically, as the musical avant-garde of the time largely eschewed narrative both textual and melodic, Breton called for a return to the tradition of song. In the end, though, parallels between music and painting or music and literature cannot hold too securely, as Garon inadvertently demonstrates in his reluctance to engage with music proper, focusing solely on blues lyrics instead. From the outset, he writes in his introduction, we must emphasize our irritation at the lack of understanding we have of the specific emotional meaning of music (Garon 9). Music does, in a sense, seem to fall outside of Bretons definition of surrealism: to expressverbally, by means of the written word, or in any other mannerthe actual functioning of thought (Breton Manifestoes 26). Can music correspond to a typology of art limited to representation and perception? It is equally arguable that music causes certain functioning of thought rather than expresses itthough it would be the greatest mistake to argue it is merely one or the other. Breton and Garons focus on the fusion of words and music dodges the issue of how music as such affects the mind. Though Garon quotes psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as claiming that in speech tone communicates more than words (which are related to psychoanalytic secondary processes), he does not engage with how this presents itself in the musical form of the blues, focusing instead on a model of identificationa relationship between listener and performer based on a linguistic model of representation (Garon

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13;16). There is certainly a representative aspect of music. Taken to its extreme it would leave a Looney Tunes model of sound/image correspondence (Tchaikovskys Romeo and Juliet means love, Wagners Flight of the Valkyries means fear, descending augmented fifths are equivalent to embarrassment, brass bands playing major chords embody triumph, etc.). This is hardly a satisfactory understanding of the form. Perhaps music would be better thought of as a singular variation of the profane illumination Walter Benjamin credits surrealism with exposing, the experience of which brings new thoughts, emotions, and instincts to the surface of the psycheas productive rather than merely representative (Benjamin 209). 3. Garons avoidance of the aural is one reason he cannot surmount the limitations inherent to a generic definition of the blues. He rebukes the constant resorting to vague criteria like funky and soul, as evidence that we are still incapable of describing, in secondary process terms (words), the nature of our primary process response to the blues (Garon 13). This is vital to his dismissal of later R&B and soul music, the most explicit symptom of his linguistic bias. He goes as far as to equate the very concept of soul, not to mention the genre, with bourgeois values and in opposition to the nastiness of the blues (as described by a middle-class AfricanAmerican informant in an anthropological study) (Garon 27; 32). Garons strange conclusions become mere presumption, because he refuses to ask a necessary question. What is soul? No less authority than George Clinton, conceptualizer of the avant-gardist musical organization Parliament-Funkadelic, explored this line of inquiry five years before the publication of Garons book, in a song that takes the form of a classic call-and-response blues chant. In response to the call what is soul, Clintons various answers include:

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Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes. Soul is the ring around your bathtub. Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper. Soul is rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps. Soul is chitlins foo yung. Soul is you. He goes on to make the claim that all that is good is nasty (Mommy, Whats a Funkadelic?). Without even examining the surreality of Clintons poetry, it becomes clear that to at least one African-American soul and funk musician indebted to the blues (celebrated on the same album, Funkadelics eponymous debut, in Good Old Music and Music for My Mother), soul signifies the very material of black proletarian life, often by its proud, incongruous presence within bourgeois society. The concept later developed by Clinton of funkentelechy, the expressive materialization of a resistant unconscious element immanent to those conditions, is not far from psychic autonomism, without that notions problematic Cartesianism (Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome). One need not even go as far as the deliberately surrealistic disposition of George Clinton to release the blues impulse; casually dismissed in Poetic Spirit, James Brown used the blues form as the foundation of his most revolutionary single, Papas Got a Brand New Bag, and was steadfast in his refusal to whitewash the Black vernacular with which he spoke, sung, and otherwise vocally produced noise. The example of Brand New Bag, as well as Funkadelic, brings to light another particularly counterintuitive oversight in Garons analysis. It is a safe assumumption that most if

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not all of the blues compositions that Garon discusses were, like the aforementioned pop records, commercially released in the commodity form of the seven or twelve-inch vinyl record. This is hardly a small matter; the approach taken by thinkers like Andre Breton and Walter Benjamin led them to understand the emergence of the commodity forms of the novel, the photograph, and film, due to both the nature of their experience and their reproducibility, as significant historical shifts. Mass-produced records are sonic equivalents, and the relationship of recorded blues to the oral tradition of blues is far too complex to be overlooked, subsumed in a naive faith in the integrity of representation. Just as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Ernst and others made the nature of the presence itself of text (or image) on a page an aspect of surrealist literature, revolutionary musical forms in an age when mechanical reproduction was a given would explore the particularities of the form of their artwork-commodity. 4. A charge consistently made against popular culture, by Adorno and others, is that its form mirrors its industrial means of production; the repetitive structures and formulaic patterns are nothing less than the presence within the artwork of the regimented rhythm of the assembly line. This reductive analysis, made by those who do not listen closely, cannot locate any subversive core within the blues, a genre in which nearly every song has the same poetic and harmonic structure (three lines, three chords), both of which not only repeat, but are made up of a series of repetitions. Paul Garon, however, approaches the issue with far more subtlety: Considering the part played by repetition in our psychic life and above all its manifestations in creative activity, it is likely that one determinant of the evolution of [the AAB] verse structureis the psychological tendency toward repetition, whether it relates to

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mastery of unpleasant undischarged affects, repetition of what is pleasurable in itself, or a more all-encompassing repetition compulsion in the sense in which Freud posited it. (Garon 165) That repetition is present not only within individual instances of the blues form but is also intertextual is certainly due in part to the production of blues by a subaltern community of former slaves. In a context with a dominant cultural norm of progress, repetition of certain elements including repetition itselfstarkly declares cultural difference and autonomy. This, however, is due to the blues basis in oral folk culture rather than its later pop cultural connotation. It is worthwhile to reconsider cultural repetition and formula in a context that does not permit refuge in the same guilt-free proletarian sanctuary. One passage in Louis Aragons surrealist novel Paris Peasant finds the author in the audience of burlesque striptease performance. He celebrates this performanceonly partially ironicallyas the model of the sort of erotic, spontaneously lyrical drama that might profitably be pondered upon by all our aesthetes laboring painfully to produce something avant-garde. Like any art, it possesses its conventions and its audacities, its disciplines and its contrasts, within a pornographic, functional formula (Aragon 108). Though Aragons unreservedly masculine viewpoint complicates the matter, his focus on a sexualized event leads to an unavoidable connotation of repetition: its relation to the body. Garon quotes Austrian Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, in a discussion of the rhythms of cubism, making the connection to music explicit. Jazz has its roots in the African tom-tom. A tom-tom that I once thought I heard in a lecture-hall where a documentary film on X-rays

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was being shown. What I confused with the beating of the ageless drum was in actuality the proportionately amplified sound of a greatly magnified human heart. And the beating of the heart-drum is found again in the plastic cadence of the axe blows which liberated the powerful cubes of Negro sculpture that inspired the beating of cubist space. Against a contemporary intellectuality given over to its pretension of being the accountant of the universe, it was the beating of revolt of a new cosmic sense. (qtd. in Garon 214) Paalen is certainly guilty of homogenizing and romanticizing a primitive African continent, but there remains insight in his account. Indeed, if we take seriously psychoanalysiss call to consider what is primitive not in terms of racialized inferiority, but in reference to unalientated libidinal expression, the notion becomes liberated from ideological orientalism and presents itself as a quality present in radical art as suchModern European, traditional West African, contemporary American (Garon 12). Aragon even finds the very spirit of the primitive theatre, in a natural communion between audience and performers at the striptease, in the role of the audience to laugh, shout, dance, and so on (Aragon 109). It is, however, arguably Aragons particular identity that makes this interpretation possibleperhaps the strippers were not quite as thrilled. To identify a self-reflexive, deliberately revolutionary movement that achieves Aragon's natural communion, it may become necessary to travel farther in time and space. Part 2 5. In a French television documentary on the music of Detroit, Michigan, composer and performer Derrick May directs the camera to a place he considers metonymic of Detroit as a

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whole: the former Michigan Theater. He describes its history: Techno city, folksat its best. Welcome home. Inside this building was a theater. And they tore out the theater, and they made a carpark. But they kept the actual theater. So youre parking your car in a theater. Its fucking scary. Look at it, man. Cant you feel it? Cant you see it? Look at these archestheyve been broken off, totally destroyed. At one time, where were standing was air. People were dancing, singing in this place at one time. This was amazing! This was music, this was life. (Universal Techno) May echoes Louis Aragons lament in Paris Peasant, which chronicles how the Parisian Boulevard Haussmann, with its large department stores, came to replace the small shops and stalls found before in the arcades. The effect of the Boulevard Haussmann is echoed even now in the boulevards of the culture industry, with the vehicles of profit ceaselessly steamrolling over passing forms, exploiting marginal movements in constant rotation. Derrick May was one of the earliest creators of what is now called techno music. The producers of techno (and the related forms of hip-hop, house, and electro), in defiance of the circulation of mass culture and the false autonomy and authoritarian originality that circulates in high art museums, based their craft in thrift stores, garage sales, and pawn shops. Cheap, obsolete, synthesizers, that when tweaked and rewired adapted like living organisms, producing otherworldly noises, dismantling traditional composition and proposing new methods to their human co-composers. Records no one had played for decades, their contents transformed by samplers into subatomic particles of sound, resynthesized into nuclear bomb

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beats. Sequencing machines designed for real musicians to practice with that no real musician had tolerated, repeating loops that transformed themselves, fingers turning knobs, knobs turning minds. These reanimated scraps formed the basis of a new musical style. The techno rebels, as they called themselves, shared an insight that Walter Benjamin credited to the surrealists, who, he wrote, were the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. (Benjamin 210) Like these producer/composers exploring the anti-museums of urban commercial districts, Aragon had spent much of his wanderings sifting through decades of material in unmarked crates: This handkerchief saleswoman, this little sugar bowl which I will describe to you if you dont behave yourself, are interior boundaries of myself, ideal views I have of my laws, of my ways of thought, and may I be strung up by the neck if this passage is anything else but a method of freeing myself of certain inhibitions, a means of obtaining access to a hitherto forbidden realm that lies beyond my human energies. (Aragon 88) The profane illumination experienced in these Paris drives proved to Aragon the possibility that future mysteries will arise from the ruins of todays, just as they would half a century later in

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Detroit (Aragon 15). It is collage that transforms the experience of the consumer under capitalism from internal, affective reflection into expressive practice. As defined by Max Ernst, collage is an alchemical composition of two or more heterogenous elements, resulting from their unexpected reconciliation (qtd. in Lippard 12). Ernst could not have known it, but he had described the performance model later used by producers and DJs of postmodern African-American music. While for Ernst, these elements were reconciled through their relative flatness and their coexistence on a canvas or page, a DJs canvas is the eternal beat, the repetitive pulse that never wavers, remaining intangible and contingent. Like the canvas, it produces reconciliation, but it never takes the form of an object. It can never acquire the aura of a Great Work that Ernsts collages or even Duchamps urinal enjoy today. As Derrick May explains it, a DJ operates from the philosophy of how to make records speak to each other, how to make them sing to each otherhow to make music out of music (Universal Techno). A record made by a producer in Berlin using a machine from Japan that samples a rapper from New York might by played by a DJ from Detroit in a warehouse in England, coexisting rhythmically with a record from Brazil recorded years ago in imitation of an African-American funk musician from Georgia. This hypothetical juxtaposition is only one possible instance of the subversion of the commodity fetish inherent in the medium of the twelve-inch record into a means of pluralistic universalism, an alchemical transmutation of two slabs of mere vinyl into an ethereal third record that shines across a dancefloor like solid gold. 6. Night Drive (Time Space Transmat) is a 1985 recording by technos founder and namer, the author of its earliest manifestos, Juan Atkins. Since techno music rejects the bourgeois

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individualism of authorship through the constant adoption of synonyms, the label credits the composition to "Model 500." The song, with an insistent synthesizer vamp based on the blues scale, describes a drive down the I-94, a search for shadows out of time and space. It is not unlike a trip described by Louis Aragon in the second half of Paris Peasant, a late-night drive with Andre Breton and Marcel Noll through a garden. Both Atkins and Aragon fixate on the mystery of night, personifying it as a mysterious and dangerous woman. The night of the Twenties is a vast sheet-metal monster pierced by countless knivesNight bears tattoos, shifting patterns of tattoos upon her breast. Her hair curlers are sparks, and where the smoke trails have just died men are straddling falling stars (Aragon 141). The night of the Eighties wears a black leather micro mini skirt, high heels, and mirrored sunglasses in which the observers image is terrifyingly distorted. She looks over the Detroit skyline contemplating contemptuously the inferior designs...and the outmoded, underpowered and otherwise obsolete lifeforms. Night is both a source for despair and an opening, a loosening of the social restrictions imposed by the suna recurrent archetype in the blues as understood by Garon. Likewise, blues themes of transcendental homelessness and the animalism of humans and machines (Atkinss car is likened to a snake) are resurgent in Night Drive. Certainly there are marked differences between the lives of Parisian surrealists or Mississippi blues musicians in the early 20th Century, and that of Atkins and May during a decade of trickle-down economics and virtual reality. Night Drives refrain, TIME. SPACE. TRANSMAT. invokes the idea of teleportation as metaphor for his excursion down the highway; a science-fiction fantasy. As in textual or filmic science fiction, the deferral to the

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future cannot be misconstrued as escapism; it is an opening of a rhetorical space in which the highest flights of imagination can become expressions of a radical call for social transformation. Atkins's rhetoric tele-transmutes the marvelous and utopian elements of European avant-gardism into another world, one which includes aliens, time travel, robotsall of which signify on the presence of technology in everyday life and the uncanny strangeness of modern science, incorporating them into a critique of social control and ideology, while ultimately arriving at a proposal for resistance. The idea of techno as a nexus of the blues tradition and 20th century avant-gardism is metaphorical, but it is not merely figurative. Lacking the particular European bourgeois/literaryartistic background of Breton and his fellow surrealists, Detroit techno musicians were immersed in George Clinton rather than Lautreamont, based in the desolate postindustrial metropolis of Detroit rather than the French capital of modernity. As Derrick May explains: Industry is the principal focus of just about anybody who lives here. At one point or another, just about everyone has a family member who works for the industry. So the effect is indirectly there, but its not a positive effectits a very unaffectionate, cold effect. A machine has no love, nor any feeling. And sometimes the people who work for it end up having no feeling and no love, because theyre working relentless hours, theyre putting in total commitment to something that is giving nothing back. We tended to find the idea of making music subconsciously. [] All these sounds subconsciouslycame from the idea of industry, of mechanics, of

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machines, of electronics. (Universal Techno) The minds of these artists demonstrate an outlet for the surrealist/blues impulse in drastically different intellectual conditions, unconscious minds formed by different factors that necessarily express themselves differently. The revolutionary tendency in techno is not merely latent and unrecognized. Something like the European avant-garde, techno went through an original aesthetic, idealist phase, in which the music and its contexts for production were developed. The revolutionary content was matched to practice later, when younger musicians like the Underground Resistance collective and Carl Craig began spreading their music through avenues outside of and defiant toward the music industry, adopting deliberately militant political and intellectual stances. In the notes to his album More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, Carl Craig prints a short manifesto. Revolutionary art is not determined by itsformat of technical trickery, its interpretation of reality, or its verisimilitude, but rather by how much it revolutionizes our thinking and imagination; overturning our preconceptions, bias and prejudice and inspiring us to change ourselves and the world. (Craig 1997) It is not unrealistic to consider this cultural movement as a further step toward what Walter Benjamin called for in his essay on Surrealism, The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia: Only when in technology, body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation,

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and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. (Benjamin 218) Breton also emphasized this revolutionary potential in culture, writing that if through Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which are, and if we ourselves declare that by a path which is, a path which we can show and help people to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed was not (Manifestoes 128). Or in other words: They say there is no hope They say no U.F.O.s Why is no head held high? Maybe well see them fly. Juan Atkins (Model 500, No U.F.O.s)

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Works Cited Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Atkins, Juan. 20 Years Metroplex. Tresor, 2005. Baraka, Amiri. Black Music. New York: Da Capo, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. _____. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1978. Craig, Carl. More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. Planet E, 1997. Deleuze, Dominique. Universal Techno. Arte. Strasbourg. Sept. 1996. Funkadelic. Funkadelic. Westbound, 1970. Garon, Paul. Blues and the Poetic Spirit. New York: City Lights, 1996. Lippard, Lucy. Max Ernst: Passed and Pressing Tensions. Art Jounral. 33, (Autumn 1973): 1217. Parliament. Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Casablanca, 1978.

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